If you like Copland and Ives, you should enjoy this disc.

Gardner Read was born in Evanston, Illinois and has enjoyed a prolific and varied career as composer, conductor, teacher and author. As a high school student majoring in music he studied piano and Organ privately and took lessons in composition at Northwestern University's School of Music. During the summers of 1932 and 1933, he studied composition and conducting at the National Music Camp, Interlochen, Michigan, where in 1940, he taught composition and Orchestration. In 1932, he was awarded a four-year scholarship to Eastman, where his principal teachers were Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. In 1938, on a Cromwell Traveling Fellowship to Europe, he studied with Pizzetti in Rome and briefly with Sibelius in Finland, just before the outbreak of World War II. He also studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood in1941. From 1941 to 1948 Read headed the composition departments of the St. Louis Institute of Music, the Kansas City Conservatory of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 1948, he was appointed composer-in-residence and professor of composition at the School of Music, Boston University, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1978. The major work on this disc, the Piano Concerto, although composed in 1973-78, had to wait until January 31, 1996 for its premiere. The performance on this disc is of that wonderful performance. Randall Hodgkinson does a terrific job.

Review:

"Despite a prolific production exceeding the 150-opus mark, Gardner Read - who was born in Chicago in 1913 and studied with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music - is probably better known by most musicians as the author of a useful manual on music notation. Read finished his Piano Cocnerto in 1978. It's a big, ambitious, rugged work in a modern but not avant-garde idiom employing lots of dissonance but avoiding fragmentation. Randall Hodgkinson's performance is brilliant, too.All three vocal pieces are idiomatically written and avoid the complexities and clashing dissonances of the concerto." (American Record Guide)